Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon---and the Journey of a Generation
Audio CD – CD, April 15, 2008
Description
From Publishers Weekly Weller's cultural history of the titans of women in rock in the 1970s details the artistic, sexual and symbolic twists and turns of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon in careful, loving detail. Susan Ericksen reads like one of the girls, picking up from Weller's tone and sounding like a woman of the era, besotted with the music and with the sense of boundaries being broken and glass ceilings smashed. While Ericksen occasionally slips, pronouncing words incorrectly and stumbling over unwieldy sentences, her performance is, for the most part, very solid. Weller's book is ambitious and wide-ranging, but Ericksen keeps its story tight and engaging. An Atria hardcover (reviewed online). (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. "There were five books by my bedside when Girls Like Us arrived, but this was the book I had to keep reading." ---Sara Davidson, bestselling author of Leap! Sheila Weller, the senior contributing editor at Glamour, is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Dancing at Ciro's and Marrying the Hangman.Susan Ericksen is a three-time Audie Award-winning narrator who has recorded over 500 books. The winner of multiple awards, including twenty-plus AudioFile Earphones Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Susan is a classically trained actress who excels at multiple narrative styles and accents. From AudioFile In three interwoven biographies, Sheila Weller chronicles the life and times of three tradition-breaking women singer-songwriters--Carole King, a Brooklyn-born earth mother; Joni Mitchell from the Canadian prairie; and Carly Simon, wealthy New Yorker, radiant, sexy, and riddled by stage fright. Narrator Susan Ericksen has a ball dishing the rock 'n' roll dirt with the girls. Ericksen lends a lovely melodic tone to the stories of these tunesmiths who became the voices of a generation of women. Her reading is controlled and intelligent. Of the women, Weller interviewed only Carly Simon personally, but the book works pretty well, weaving together magazine quotes and interviews with friends and lovers. Ericksen makes the material sound like a novel. No, three novels. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine Read more
Features & Highlights
- Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Each woman is distinct: King is the product of outer-borough, middle-class New York City; Mitchell is a granddaughter of Canadian farmers; and Simon is a child of the Manhattan intellectual upper crust. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, a great swath of American girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Their stories trace the arc of the now-mythic generation known as "the sixties"—the female version—but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliché. The history of the women of that generation had never been written—until now—and it is told through the resonant lives and emblematic songs of Mitchell, Simon, and King. Filled with the voices of many dozens of these women's intimates, this alternating biography reads like a novel—except it's all true, and the heroines are famous and beloved. Sheila Weller captures the character of each woman and gives a balanced portrayal enriched by a wealth of new information. Girls Like Us is an epic treatment of midcentury women who dared to break tradition and become what none had been before them—confessors in song, rock superstars, and adventurers of heart and soul.
